Civilization and the Semantic Web

This was one start at a Semantic Web Architecture paper. It
didn't get very far, but the diagrams are excellent.

Why Are We Here?

For the last ten thousand years or so, people have been developing
and deploying information management technologies. The ancient
technique of using physical objects to store knowledge, writing, is
perhaps the most important one. The use of writing is often
considered the essential characteristic of civilization. A second,
more subtle technology is the practice of rational argument, or logic,
which is perhaps the most crucial element of a democractic society.
These two early communication techniques represent two fields of
invention which continue into modern information systems: the
externalization of memory and processing.

For the last ten years or so, people have been developing and
deploying web clients and servers, building the web into one of the
largest and most complex information systems ever built. The web has
been thoroughly successful, yet it is plagued with problems and falls
far short of its promise.

Over the years, the W3C has been addressing these issues. In focusing on
censorship, search quality, ..., the area of metadata, and the general
structure of data was addressed. But this general structure of data
is much more useful than for just labeling web pages.

Semantic Web technology offers to address
some of these areas. With an eye on the larger history, we can
perhaps see how the Semantic Web will fit into human society, and
which component technologies need to be developed first.

Message Passing

Shared Memory

External Logic

This is pretty nice, but too simple for the real world, where (1)
the world keeps changing, (2) some providers want to keep their
information secret from some users (privacy), (3) some users want to
ignore some providers (belief), (4) the shared memory and inference
engines must be distributed (scaling).